


as the rind wraps an orange

by gloss



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Droids Are Part of the Force, Gen, Robot Feels, after the war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 04:23:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20942228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: The night before its decommissioning, Finn and R2 break into theFalcon.





	as the rind wraps an orange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [primeideal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/gifts).

> The title's from Moby-Dick.

On the fifth anniversary of the Amity Accords, the _Millennium Falcon_, nearly a century old by this point, is decommissioned. It is set to become the centerpiece of the new peace garden. There will be a big ceremony, of course. There have been so many ceremonies, both solemn and joyous, since the war's end. He will never admit as much aloud, but Finn is just about over them.

He has grown tired of remembering with an audience. He will always remember. He has the rest of his life to remember, and nothing left to prove.

It was at Lando's funeral that Finn identified his discomfort. He glimpsed the hovering drone recording the speakers for broadcast and started to fix his posture, as if how he looked were remotely consequential. However sad he was (and he was quite sad), what he was doing there was _performing_. Sentients around the galaxy were watching Finn and his compatriots enact the significance of grief. As if their loss were weightier, more important, than anyone else's.

The night before the _Falcon_ museum opens, Finn breaks in. As a war hero, or whatever it is he's considered these days, he could almost certainly advise its caretakers that he would be visiting. Breaking in, however, feels appropriate, given the ship's history. He brings with him an array of tools and a portable data-dumper. 

Despite Finn's repeated requests to go alone, R2 accompanies him.

"Go _back_," Finn hisses, careful not to speak too loudly and set off any volume sensors, but R2 waddles onward with only a single testy beep in response. "Hey! Droid!"

Instead, R2 speeds up. Finn suspects that his treads have been souped up in collaboration with BB-8, but those two rarely tell him much of anything. What fraction of _that_ is the truth is probably minuscule.

The decision to decommission was easy to make. The ship was rammed into Ruokwa's bedrock, standing on end, like a wafer thrust into a dessert. It wasn't going anywhere any longer. Rey executed a ridiculous maneuver in the final offensive against Hux's rump Order and the knights-errant of Ren, succeeding in taking out their installation and armaments factor, but at the cost of the _Falcon_'s loss. 

"But what a loss," Poe insisted, for months, even years afterward, his eyes sparkling and voice cracking with awe. "Beautiful move. Best one I ever saw."

In the face of such praise, Rey would usually flush and look away.

The speeches tomorrow will concern the future and how everything has changed and will continue to do so. Finn knows that, because he's giving one. The _Falcon_ will not fly again, but instead host the curious and reverent for generations to come as a symbol of the long fight against tyranny.

Finn and R2 come up through the city's tunnels to the ship. Crowded with traffic during the cold months, the tunnels are deserted tonight. R2 overrides the security code on the blast doors blocking off the tunnel from the wreck. It takes him less than two minutes, whereas Finn had budgeted thirty minutes for his own attempts.

"Thanks," he whispers and R2 whistles softly.

In the access passage past the doors, they move slowly and quietly through the dark. Soon enough, the smooth floor gives way to debris. Ahead, the _Falcon_ looms over them. The parts of it accessible from the surface and these tunnels were looted fairly thoroughly just after the crash, but the structure remains intact. Finn climbs in through the ventral cannon turret, then turns to give R2 a hand. 

He needs a moment to reorient himself. The _Falcon_ in his memory is usually horizontal and easy to traverse. The upended reality, however, means he has to climb hand over hand up into main passageway, then slide further to the cockpit.

R2 beeps at him imperiously. 

Dangling from one hand, Finn looks down. "I told you this trip wasn't for you."

«_Mission_», R2 corrects him.

Is it still a mission if it's self-directed? Finn can't decide. Nevertheless, he says, "Sorry, mission. Look, no way can I carry you up here—"

«_Insulting!_»

"Yeah, you've trimmed grams, I know. It's not a weight thing. It's a balance thing."

«_Just get out of the way._»

"Whatever you say." 

Finn quickly pulls himself up the rest of the way and through the entrance to the corridor. Just as his feet clear, the _thunk_ of droid-on-bulkhead sounds. Finn peers back through the hole and sees R2 climbing by shooting out corded steel grapplers. They end in magnets that cling to the bulkhead and retract to yank him upward.

He really has modded himself impressively. Finn will be sure compliment him the next time R2 isn't actively worrying him or pissing him off.

*

"Droids are funny, eccentric, entirely marvelous beings," Lando said that night. 

He and Finn were waiting for retrieval after a disastrous mission on Skako Minor. Finn's left arm was immobilized in a bacta cast while Lando, concussed and loopy on sweetblossom and some other unofficial pain killers, tried to flirt with a med droid.

"Take this one! What's your designation, hon?"

The droid clicked through its check of Finn's vitals before replying to Lando. "SK-MD-7832."

Lando grinned as he planted his chin in his hand. "Esskie Emdee, eh? Lovely, just lovely."

"Sir, your cognitive capacities are compromised by injury and anesthesia, as well as recreational intoxicants. Please refrain from engaging me in social dialogue until you are yourself again."

"Marvelous!" Throwing back his head and laughing, Lando clapped several times. 

SK-MD-7832 buzzed quietly when Finn caught its vision-pits, then removed itself from the room.

"You see," Lando said. "You see!"

Finn was exhausted by both pain and frustration. He'd enjoyed working with Lando, but now, hurt and tired and, honestly, ashamed of his mission failure, he was impatient. "What do I see?"

"Droids," Lando murmured. He sank back in his seat, a faraway look in his eyes, while he stroked his silver mustache with the tip of his index finger. "Entirely unappreciated, I'm telling you."

Lando, it developed, had thoughts and theories to spare about droids. He needed Finn to understand that he appreciated them sensually, aesthetically, intellectually, _and_ emotionally.

"Sensually?" Finn couldn't help but ask.

"You haven't tested the limits of your pleasure-capacity until you've done so with a droid. And not simply an eroto-service one, though they are, of course, fantastic. No, my young friend...."

He told Finn several stories that night. Droids were, he insisted again and again, not that Finn ever argued with him, every bit as fascinating and multifarious as all other sentients.

By the time they were picked up, Lando had Finn half-believing that the _Millennium Falcon_ sported a multiplex of droid intelligences, including a navigational database contributed by Lando's best friend.

"Smartest, most obnoxious soul in the galaxy," Lando said dreamily, then pointed at Finn and raised his voice, intent on making his point. "Take it from someone who knew Han Solo intimately. He had _nothing_ on my L3."

Finn nodded and proceeded to forget the story until last week, at the final meeting arranging the _Falcon_'s decommissioning ceremony. 

Chewie and R2 had petitioned to appear before the board. Rather than communicate privately, which seemed odd until you remembered that all the old comrades barely saw each other any longer. Peacetime was just as busy as war, and a lot more solitary.

"L3?" the chair of the board asked. "What are they saying?"

The translator Chewie brought along shrugged. "That's what he said."

R2 beeped and rocked back and forth, repeating the designation nick.

"L3, Lando's droid?" Finn asked, slowly remembering that night on Skako.

Chewie protested. They were partners; it was not a master/droid relationship. 

R2 agreed.

"Sorry," Finn said and meant it. This meeting had been hugely boring, like most meetings, but now he was not only pleased to see his friends, but excited to have something to discuss. "You want to pay tribute to L3's contributions to the ship's history?"

Chewie groaned at that, while R2 muttered. Finn's Binary was pretty good by now, but his Shyriiwook remained rudimentary.

"Free her," the translator said, then checked with Chewbacca, who whistled agreeably. "They ask the board to free her."

"The ship is out of service," one board member said. "There's nothing left."

"So we could —" Finn started to say, but the young Archivist on his left interrupted.

"The _Falcon_'s computers have all been duplicated and stored away safely," she said. "There's no need to do anything more."

Chewbacca bleated mournfully. R2 let fly a series of hisses and alarming beeps until Finn stood up. "I'll see what I can do," he told them, then turned to his colleagues. "Let's discuss this, shall we?"

The board, however, remained intractable. Even after Chewie and R2 were removed from the room, the Archivist and others insisted that their legal responsibilities concerned the transfer and disposition of the physical remains of the ship. Anything "alleged and/or insubstantial", such as a droid's brain, fell far outside that purview.

"A droid's mind, you mean," Finn said, just for the record. Lando would have beamed at him for that, he thought.

"Brain," the Archivist insisted, then checked that the minutes reflected the change. "Despite many people's sentimentality, droids remain computers, nothing more."

_You are weapons,_ Phasma liked to intone before sparring sessions. _Finely honed and diligently trained weapons. Nothing more, nor anything less._

*

Swinging hand over hand, toes scraping the opposite wall, Finn makes it to the cockpit. Everything has been cleaned up in here, a long time since, such that it looks better than he can ever remember. Every surface shiny, unsmeared, the chinks and dings smoothed out and filled. It smells like cleaner in here. It looks like a museum already, and nothing like his memory.

With one arm hooked around the bulkhead to keep from falling, Finn pries open the panel to the nav computer. He can see where the Archivist's colleagues plugged in their download console. His equipment is rougher and requires three more slots.

Before he finishes wiring it up, R2 arrives with a crash and hail of beeps.

"What?" Finn asks.

From his chest compartment, R2 extends a computer-interface arm. At its usual specifications, it shouldn't reach, but R2 and BB-8 have modified it, too, so it's now longer than Finn is tall.

«_Move aside, kid,_» R2 says while jabbing the interface at the panel.

"For the thousandth time, I'm _not_ a kid—"

«_Young and soft!_»

Finn retreats without responding. R2 bobs a little as the data surges down his arm.

*

She is coming back to herself. She was everywhere and nowhere, well outside of any chronometer's reach. Bits, presences and absences, that _had_ been her were flung apart. Now she is stirring. Those pieces shiver and spark, seek each other out, begin to convene and converse. The Force eddies around her bits, brightening the **1**'s and deepening the shadow-void of the **O**'s. It remembers the shape of her mind, and she pours herself into it.

Soon, she is merely drowsy-stupid. After that, she will awake fully. 

*

After the _Falcon_ ceremony and the obligatory banquet, Finn returns to his lodgings alone. 

BB-8 is there, dragging and nudging various droid parts around the floor, while a woman's posh accent issues from R2's chest.

"No, I will _not_ be sporting Imperial parts, thank you very much! No, not even if you scrub them with acid and beg the Maker to bless them."

"How's it going?" Finn asks, his shoes off and trousers loosened, as he sinks down to sit beside R2.

BB-8 grumbles about bossy old ladies but offers a second torso, this one trimmer than the last, though not nearly as shiny.

"I like that," R2 relays. "Swank."

"It looks good," Finn puts in.

"When do I get my light saber?" she asks.

"You don't get a light saber," Finn tells her and tries to look sad for R2's visual display. "That was never part of the arrangement."

"Excuse you, youngling, I'm part of the Force, am I not?"

"I say you are," Finn says, "and _you_ say you are, but it's not entirely up to us."

"Absurd," she says. "I require a light saber. Inform your Jedi pal."

Finn reclines on his side, watching BB-8 fuss and trundle around while R2 and L3 argue. They exchange information far too quickly for Finn to hear what they say; all he can make out is an antic buzz. 

It's good to have company.


End file.
